Happy Birthday, Mom

@senivpetro via Freepik

Today is my mom's birthday. She spent most of her life concealing her age, so I won't tell you how old she would have been, but I will say that now, seven years after I wrote this post, my feelings haven't changed one bit. 

My mom passed away last summer after a courageous battle with the ugly demon that is cancer. She was brave and strong and stubborn from start to finish, and I was privileged to have her as my mom.

Most days, I feel brave and strong and stubborn but, some days, I miss her so much I can taste it. I miss her laugh and her hugs, our shared love of dinner reservations instead of dinner preparations, and hours on the phone spent talking about everything and nothing.

I miss her championing my creative pursuits, her certainty that in any production anywhere I was the best one on stage (unless my niece was in the show, in which case it would be a tie) and her fierce loyalty to those she loved.

What I miss most of all, though, is being able to tell her anything. When someone hurt my feelings, or made me angry, I could complain to my mom and she'd take my side -- so much so that I sometimes found myself defending the person I'd started out complaining about. If I was wrong or short-sighted, she'd let me know, but only after I'd finished whining about the unfairness of it all. I never had to worry about being judged or chided.

Or mature.

It's only now beginning to dawn on me that part of what I miss is the fact that, with my mom around, I never really had to be a full-fledged grown-up. It's overrated, this grown-up business.

I'm not very wise, but I am wise enough to know how blessed I was to have my mom for most of my adult life. I'm smart enough to be grateful for all that she gave me and taught me, as well as most of what she passed onto me by osmosis. I know that being with her and my dad as she fought a battle she didn't want to fight (perhaps the ultimate grown-up act) was a gift -- one that gave me a chance to say all the things I wanted to say, and to prepare myself for the inevitability of good-bye. 

My dad now lives less than ten minutes away from us; his relocation is the silver lining in the cloud that was losing my mom. He, too, is a cushion against full grown-up status, and I treasure the relationship we are nurturing in our new normal.

Dads are different than Moms, something that is both good and inevitable. As my dad and I move forward, knitted closer together by a loss neither of us wanted, we're deciding what to keep, what to discard and what to change, not only with respect to material possessions, but in our relationship as well. We haven't lived in the same zip code full-time since I moved out of my parents' house to go to college, back when I was barely a contender in the grown-up game.

The trouble with the grown-up game is that the rules are ever-changing. We think we're grown up when we move out, when we graduate from college, when we get our first job, when we get married, when we become parents. But each of these events merely shapes who we become; no one of them completely defines us or fully describes the joys and challenges that lay on the other side of these milestones.

Losing a parent is another milestone -- one no one wants to achieve. There's a hole in my life where my mom was -- one no one can fill. I don't mean that to be maudlin or sentimental -- it just is. Maybe that realization takes me one step closer to full grown-up status, or maybe it's merely an observation.

Either way, it doesn't make this grown-up business any less confusing. 

Friday Feature: The Library Pile

 I'm delighted to be back to writing Friday Features! (For more on this journey, see Tuesday's blog post :-)

Up this week: the library pile.

While I'm still not on the every-other-week library schedule I was on when my daughter was small, I'm getting there much more frequently than I have in a long time. The piles of books I bring home are also noticeably smaller but, since I have plenty of books on my bookshelves (and Kindle) at home, I have plenty of choices, which is what brought me back to Friday Features. 

In this week's stack, Run, Rose, Run is what brought me to the library in the first place. I saw a write-up about it in People (which is a book recommendation source more often than I care to admit), so I reserved it. While at the library to pick it up, I snagged the other three books from the bookshelves just inside the door holding the newest acquisitions (as you can see from the stickers).

Talk about temptation.

I started with Make Space for Happiness, which is a book about why we have clutter and what it replaces. It's written in a very approachable style, with a bit of tough love interwoven among the insights. As someone who loves all things organizing, I'm looking forward to finishing it.

Penny Chic grabbed my attention because I've been on a personal style kick. It was a quick read (as expected) and older than I expected (2014) since I snagged it off the new arrivals shelf. Written by a fashion blogger for an audience substantially younger than I am, it didn't have much to offer me, but it was fun to page through and a very quick read.

Having saved the novels for last, I'm also looking forward to Happy Place by Emily Henry. I've liked some of her books, but not others, and I'm hoping this one falls into the former category. I'm in the mood for a good novel. 

What are you reading? Have you read any of these? Share your thoughts and/or recommendations in the comments :-)

Filling Up on Literary Hors D'Oeuvres

 Last month, for the first time in several years, I didn't meet or exceed my goal of finishing two books by the end of the month. It wasn't that I wasn't reading. I'd been reading magazines and sampling other books, but not finishing them. Some didn't keep my interest, and others did, but I didn't get them finished. Re-discovering this blog from three years ago reminded me that some months -- or seasons -- are sampling seasons, and that it sometimes takes a lot of sampling to find a main course that's worth finishing.

A few weeks ago, after starting to read yet another new book, I embarked on a reading sampling. At the beginning of the month, frustrated by my habit of starting many books then taking forever to finish them, I'd set a goal to finish reading (any) one of the books I'd already started, along with (any) one of the books I'd started listening to on Audible by the end of October. 

Why a reading sampling? Wasn't that the opposite of what I was trying to achieve? Actually, it was a step toward it. My mission was to read excerpts from several of the books on the small shelf beside the family room sofa (my "actively reading" shelf) and determine the most likely candidate for an October 31 completion. In addition, I'd relocate anything I picked up that didn't pique my interest. 

It was an interesting idea. Nearly everything on the shelf is non-fiction, so there was no mixing of characters and plots, something that would have been have interesting in a completely different (and most likely confusing) way. As I scanned the shelves, I already had a front-runner in mind -- a book interesting enough to keep my attention, with enough pages read that a month-end finish was realistic -- but I was open to new possibilities. 

With only two weeks to go, I quickly eliminated several of the shelf denizens. More than one possible selection was too dense to be a contender; others looked good, but hadn't yet been started, so they didn't make the cut. 

Or so I thought. 

I picked up a book recently relocated from another reading pile, one with a bookmark stuck in about halfway through. I quickly realized that although I'd skimmed some of it because it had content relevant to one of my classes, I hadn't actually started reading it. Had I realized that, I'd have left it on the shelf.

But it was too late. Intoxicated by its new book smell and alluring subject matter, I was powerless. I flipped back to the beginning, starting my third new book in two days.

I think I might have a problem.

Needless to say, the newcomer quickly captured my attention. Now I have two contenders. One with fewer pages remaining (the obvious choice) and the one I held in my hand. And did I mention I started another one this morning? And yet another yesterday?

I can quit any time. Really. (Starting new books, that is. I have no intention of quitting reading).

By the end of the evening's sampling, I had narrowed it down to two books. I want to savor both yesterday's new book or this morning's new book more than a two-week reading window will allow, so they're on the reading list, but not the read-in-the-next-two-weeks reading list.

Which book did I choose? Did I finish? Did I meet my goal?

Image by Rousseau from Pixabay

Fast forward a week, to when I finished the Audible book (Michael J. Fox's No Time Like the Future). Mission #1 accomplished. 

Fast forward another week, to the last week of the month. On Thursday, I finished You're Not Listening 
by Kate Murphy. Mission accomplished, with three days to spare. 

I wonder what I'll read in November. 

I think it's time to sample the contenders.

Reinstatement

 Once upon a time there was a blogger who retired early. With time on her hands, she committed (some might say overcommitted) to a regular blogging schedule and, in the beginning, it was good. She wrote regularly and the commitment she made to posting regularly gave structure to her days, while keeping her brain and fingers nimble.

Then, the retired blogger took on some outside (paying) work. At first, it was manageable but, over time, it grew and grew. Before she knew it, she was struggling to find time to come up with topics, let alone the energy to string intelligent sentences together. Her posts trickled off and she was sad, but she was also tired. 

Tired won. 

Some of her favorite posts to write were the Friday Features. Originally, she did them on a weekly basis. Then, as life got busy, writing about reading presented more of a challenge, not to mention detracting from the whole reading thing in the first place. The blogger tried other Friday ideas, but they never worked as well on the page as they did in her imagination.

A little while later, the blogger, who also liked to read, discovered that her bookshelves were bulging. In an effort to save money and keep books from overrunning the house, she returned to her local library. This action, as you can imagine, expanded her to-be-read pile, something that had both advantages and disadvantages.

One advantage was that increasing her reading led the blogger back to her Friday Features. As is often the case in fables and fairy tales, she'd learned her lesson about overcommitting and opted to re-establish this feature on an every-other-week basis. 

The blogger, who is happy to be back to writing about books, hopes that her readers will join her on the porch swing for these Friday Features, and that she, her readers and her Friday Features will live happily ever after.

Sometimes I Wonder

MetsikGarden via Pixabay

I'm a big fan of The Big Bang Theory. At the end of each episode, creator Chuck Lorre posts vanity cards.

The other night, I was watching a rerun and the card at the end was a list: Sometimes I wonder.

That got me thinking. 

Here are a few things I wonder:

• How does anyone ever get to inbox zero?
• Are Type A organizers' homes always that perfectly tidy or do they have Monica Geller closets?
• What impact will AI have on writers, writing, and books?
• When I retire for real, will I be bored?
• Are shopping malls gone for good, or will they have a resurgence?
• Will I find a home for my novel? 
• How much money do I really need for retirement?
• Who will be our next president?
• Could I ever leave this house and live somewhere else?
• Why do bad things happen to good people?
• Why do good things happen to bad people?
• What is heaven like?

I'm sure that I'll think of several more as soon as I post this blog and, admittedly, some are too personal to post. 

How about you? What do you wonder?

Black and White

 I'd planned my outfit ahead of time. All I needed to do was choose a white shirt to go with my black-and-white skirt.

And this is what that process looked like.

I'd like to say this is the whole collection, but that would be a lie. 

Surely I sorted through this pile and got rid of a few when I got home from work, right?

Well, that's half right. I did sort through them.... 

Right before I hung them all up and put them back in my closet, beside the group of black shirts that's approximately the same size. 

In my defense, I did consider each shirt before returning it to the closet. All the shirts were white, but they varied in length, sleeve length, and style.

Hence, my trial-and-error styling.

I really do try to avoid keeping clothes that aren't "just right." But, I also have a tendency to buy multiples of shirts that are "just right," especially when they're black or white because they go with everything. 

Or so I thought. But, as it turns out, when it comes to getting dressed for work, the choices are not always black and white.

Even when they are.

Finding a New Way In

 In February 2022, I embarked on The Writer 28 Day Word Challenge, which was part of my pursuit of a balance between creativity and productivity. It started me on the path I wrote about in yesterday's post, so I thought I'd share a post from that experiment today.

Today's word was "fizzle" and that's exactly what my writing did.

But that's okay. One of my purposes in taking on this challenge was to write every day and, just a week into this project, I've been successful in that pursuit. One day, I barely made it in under the wire, but I made it.

Another goal was to shake things up -- to boost my creativity and come at my writing from a new angle. So, when the word "fizzle" conjured up nothing useful, I went a different way, using the word as an acrostic and brainstorming as many interesting words as I could to go with each letter. I may never use them for any specific purpose, but it was fun playing with language. 

This word challenge is part of a bigger picture. This year, I'm inviting creativity in. I still have projects with finite goals, but focusing on productivity and goal-oriented writing have left me stymied and in danger of losing all the joy that writing can bring. It was time to rediscover the love of the written word that made me want to write in the first place.

So I'm doing something new. I'm investigating sketchnoting, podcasting, and word-a-day challenges, including the craze du jour, Wordle. I'm creating graphics for my Facebook group page and wrapping my writing in broader pursuits, hoping that new approaches will feed the muse, who seems to have grown tired of the steady diet of closed loop tasks I keep giving her. 

Doing something new gives us the luxury of being more playful. Stepping out of our usual tasks and stepping back from our usual targets gives us the freedom to worry less about being perfectly productive. And ironically, if past experience is any indication, freeing ourselves of the need to be perfectly productive can, in the end, lead us to approach the same old tasks with a brand new energy.

As winter persists before tiptoeing slowly into spring, I want to bring in my own sunlight. To do this, I'll be on the lookout for new creative pursuits, or opportunities to involve myself in old ones, with the common denominator being the freedom to explore and create instead of persist and finish. I'm not giving up on my finite projects; I'm just making them a part of something bigger that I hope will nourish and sustain them -- and me.